Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian woman near the Qalandiya checkpoint separating Ramallah from Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday... Saleh Higazi, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East program, said that Wahdan “did not appear to be carrying a firearm and did not pose any immediate threat to the guards or to the lives of people in the vicinity when they opened fire.'
'This strongly suggests that her killing may have been unlawful,' Higazi stated.
Higazi added that 'the complete lack of accountability for Israeli forces who carry [out] human rights violations' is what allows the pattern of unlawful killings to continue.
He pointed to Israel’s 'horrific track record of committing serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.'
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/palestinian-woman-fatally-shot-israeli-checkpoint
In zijn roman Crime and Punishment (1866) gaat Fjodor Dostojevski ‘uit van het bestaan van een soort Übermensch. De hoofdpersoon, Raskolnikov, suggereert dat sommige mensen zo geniaal zijn, dat wetten die zijn opgesteld door middelmatige mensen niet op hen van toepassing zijn. Effectief staan ze dus boven de wet.’
De grote Russische auteur zet uiteen dat:
All men are divided into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary.' Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don't you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary.
Enkele jaren voor zijn dood constateerde de in Nederland prominente publicist Jan Blokker dat 'Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog het jodendom in de christelijke wereld vrijwel heilig [is] verklaard en geen volk dat in die processie zo hard vooroploopt als de Nederlanders'
De Joods-Israelische hoogleraar psychologie aan de Universiteit van Haifa, die in de VS, Engeland en Frankrijk doceerde, Benjamin Beit Hallahmi, verklaarde in 2008 tegenover mij: ‘Hoewel overal in de moderne wereld het kolonialisme verworpen is, is Israël nog steeds een koloniale garnizoensstaat.’ In zijn boek Original Sins. Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israël (1998) stelt hij:
Het lijden van de joden door de eeuwen heen, en speciaal tijdens de Holocaust, is gebruikt om het ontzeggen van Palestijnse rechten te rationaliseren en te rechtvaardigen. Dit is zo doeltreffend gebeurd dat de Palestijnen beschouwd worden als de agressors in het Israëlisch-Palestijnse conflict, dat gezien wordt als een simpele voortzetting van de eeuwenlange joodse vervolging.
En:
Diep (of niet zo diep) is iedere zionist zich bewust van de fundamentele immoraliteit van de manier waarop het zionisme de oorspronkelijke bewoners heeft behandeld.
En:
In ruil voor de onbeperkte politieke steun aan Israel hebben de Amerikaanse joden gekregen waaraan het hen het meest ontbreekt: ideologische inhoud om de leegte van hun identiteit te vullenen.
Tijdens mijn interview met hem, merkte Beit Hallahmi op:
Al ten tijde van Napoleon waren zowel de Fransen en eerder nog de Russen voor het vestigen van een westerse kolonie in Arabisch gebied. Op hun beurt beloofden de Engelsen de zionisten in 1917 een deel van Palestina, zelfs nog voordat ze het gebied bezit hadden. De Britse overheid schond daarmee duidelijk het natuurlijke recht van de inheemse bevolking, de joden vormden er op dat moment minder dan 10 procent van de bevolking. De reden van die Europese gulheid was dat van de zionisten verwacht werd een koloniale rol te gaan spelen die de westerse belangen veiligstelden. De zionistische leiders waren daar ten volle van doordrongen. Max Nordau, die samen met Theodor Herzl de Zionistische Wereld Organisatie had opgericht; verklaarde al in 1919 in aanwezigheid van Britse politici als minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Balfour en premier Lloyd George: ‘Wij weten wat u van ons verwacht. Wij zullen de bewakers moeten zijn van het Suezkanaal. Wij zullen de schildwachten moeten zijn voor uw weg naar India via het Nabije Oosten. Wij zijn bereid deze moeilijke militaire opdracht te vervullen, maar het is dan van wezenlijk belang ons toe te staan een macht te worden om ons zo in staat te stellen onze taak te verrichten.’
Om dit mogelijk te maken werd de befaamde Balfour Declaration, waarbij de Joden een deel van Palestina kregen, opgenomen in de mandaat-overeenkomst. In die overeenkomst werd geregeld dat de Britse overheid Palestina ‘onder een zodanig politiek, administratief, en economisch bestel’ zou plaatsen dat het ‘de vestiging van het Joodse Nationaal Tehuis veilig zal stellen.’ Een van de manieren om dit initiatief te verkopen aan antisemitische Europese mogendheden als het tsaristische Rusland en de Franse republiek was te stellen dat het zogeheten ‘joodse vraagstuk’ opgelost zou worden door het naar het Midden-Oosten te exporteren. Het zionisme paste naadloos in de aloude traditie om Europese problemen door expansie op te lossen. Het is ook niet verbazingwekkend dat de latere premier van Israel, Moshe Sharett, destijds directeur van de politieke afdeling van het Joods Agentschap, nog in 1942 verklaarde dat de Palestijnen niet hoefden te worden geraadpleegd om een overeenkomst over Palestina te sluiten, aangezien niet zij het laatste woord zouden hebben, maar de Britten en Amerikanen. Dat waren nu eenmaal de spelregels van het kolonialisme en dus reageerden de zionisten op de Palestijnen zoals de Europese kolonisten hadden gereageerd op de Amerikaanse Indianen. Zij moesten buitenspel worden gezet, goedschiks dan wel kwaadschiks.
En aldus gebeurde, zoals uit tientallen uiterst gedocumenteerde geschiedschrijvingen van Joden zowel als niet-joden gedocumenteerd is op te maken. De meest recente die ik daarover gelezen heb is de studie State of Terror. How terrorisme created modern Israel (2016) van de Amerikaanse auteur Thomas Suárez. Hij meldt ondermeer over de Israelische terreur-aanslagen in Egypte het volgende:
Israel was ‘determined to get revenge,’ as Teddy Kollek put it, against Egypt for its execution of two of the ‘Lavon’ bombers. The pretexts came the following 23rd and 25th of February (1955) when maps and documents were stolen from an Israeli military facility, and a bicyclist was murdered near Tel Aviv, which Israel blamed on infiltrators from Gaza. With this scorecard in hand, Israel staged a brutal attack against Gazan civilians on 28 February, the bloodiest against the coastal strip since the 1948 war.
Israel’s cross border raids continued during the heat of the Lavon conspiracy. Among them, on 11 September (1954) settlers from the Mevo Beitar cooperative fired on Palestinian children swimming in a reservoir roughly a half km inside the West Bank, severely injuring a twelve and a thirteen-year-old. No action was taken against the culprits.
The morning after the trial for the ‘Lavon Affair’ bombers began in Cairo, 12 December (1954), a Syrian passenger plane left Damascus on a routine, scheduled flight to Cairo. It flew west over Lebanon, and once it was well over the Mediterranean, it turned south. A US businessman onboard estimated that they were about 70 miles offshore when, without warning, Israeli fighter planes intercepted the aircraft and forced it to land in Lydda — an air piracy ‘without precedent in the history of international practice,’ the State Department informed Sharett. Israel claimed that the plane was intercepted over its ‘sovereign’ territory in Acre (actually Palestinian, but seized in 1948), roughly sixty km south of where, according to the American witness, it crossed the coast on its westward course from Damascus. Common speculation at the time was that Israel wanted the passengers as hostages to secure the release of five Israeli soldiers whom Syria had just captured in the Golan Heights changing batteries in Israeli bugs (afluisterapparatuur. svh) on Syrian telephone lines.
In December, a young Israeli man and woman infiltrated Jordan to the southeast of the Dead Sea. Like the ‘Petra tourists’ two years earlier, Israel behaved as though they should not meet the same end as a Palestinian infiltrating Israeli-controlled territory. When in February 1955 they failed to return, UN observers asked local Bedouins’ assistance. The UN/Bedouin team found their bodies, but no clue as to what had happened. In response, an Israeli military patrol penetrated 15-20 kilometers inside the West Bank, kidnapped six random Bedouin, brought them to the Israeli side and murdered five of them, four with knifes, one with firearms. One was sixteen years old. They sent the sixth back to announce that the five were executed in revenge for the two Israeli ‘tourists.’ Israel gave wide publicity to the (unsolved) murder of the two, yet inexplicably did not file a complaint with the MAC ‘on which UN observers can initiate their normal investigations.’ Ben-Gurion prevented the soldiers from being tried for the Bedouins’ murders, and Lt.-Col R. J. Gammon (een goed geïnformeerde Britse militair. svh) speculated that this tactic — ‘abduction of isolated peasants near the border and their subsequent murder on Israeli territory’ — was replacing the tactic of fewer, larger attacks on West Bank soil.
British officials hoped never to have to make good on the defense treaty they maintained with Jordan, avoiding the issue by parsing words: was Israel ‘attacking’ Jordan, or merely ‘raiding’ it? The military nonetheless took the defense pact seriously, in part because a destabilized Jordan would invite Soviet intrigue. In early 1954, as the ‘Lavon’ operatives planned their bombings, the British developed secret plans to destroy the entire Israeli Air Force, as well as key Israeli military and communication installations, in order to stop Israeli aggression. In preparation, Britain moved one armored squadron, consisting of about 20 tanks and 100 men, from the Suez area to supplement its small garrison at Aqaba.
A summary of plans dated 27th April, 1955 read: ‘Neutralize the Israeli Air Force using all the planned reinforcements and operating from the following bases Nicosia Abu Sueir Fayid Amman and Mafraq. Conduct operations against military targets in Israel in particular centers of communications and oil installations.’
Britain had been giving military aid to Israel even as it protested Israeli crimes and soul-searched its obligation to come to the West Bank’s defense. Only in October of 1953 did it acknowledge to itself that ‘Israel’s military strength was at least partly due to our assistance’ and speak of discontinuing that aid.
Military force was also being considered to stop Israeli aggression against Gaza, and its manoeuvres inside the UN’s El Auja demilitarized zone, a turtle shell shaped area whose bottom was the Egyptian border. The area was in fact integral to Gaza and was supposed to be Palestinian, but what we know as the ‘Gaza strip’ was all that remained after 1948.
In April, 1955, the US State Department advised the British Foreign Office that the UK ‘should consider urgently what action we should be prepared to take if Israel made a deliberate attempt to alter her existing frontier with Egyptian occupied territory [the Gaza Strip],’ the ‘we’ suggesting joint US-UK action against Israel. Four months later, the Foreign Office indeed proposed enlisting the help of the United States in an attack on Israel to halt its aggression against Gaza.
1956
By 1955, Israel was treating the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as its sovereign territory. It built a military camp (which it called it a ‘kibbutz’) and planted minefields (which it called ‘non-military’). Egypt had no such militarization of the DMZ nor claimed it as its territory. It had however placed cement markers in the south, indicating its view of the (imprecise) Egyptian-DMZ border. After some back-and-forth, on 2 November, Israeli soldiers took over the DMZ’s UN compound and wiped out the Egyptian post, massacring about fifty Egyptians. Hoping to repeat its earlier success in commandeering Mt. Scopus, Israel forced out the UN peacekeepers, who continued their work as best they could from Gaza.
Finally, to create what the CIA called ‘a rise in war fever,’ on 27 December all Israeli newspapers carried an alarming report — 'inspired by the Israeli army,’ in the CIA’s judgement — that predicted a considerable increase in Arab military strength and warned of Israel’s increasing vulnerability. Israel further inflamed the ‘fever’ by moving personnel and vehicles to the Negev for what it called ‘manoeuvres’ to be held in January or February (1956). All news was spun as bad news: When General Glubb, long a thorn in Israel’s side, was dismissed from his post in March, the Israeli press now warned that the ‘threat to Israel, with Glubb’s departure, has increased ominously.’
But in the end, in a historical irony, the bungled ‘Lavon Affair’ influenced the course of events roughly as intended, if circuitously. Israel’s massacre in Gaza on 28 February, in retribution for Egypt’s execution of two of the ‘Lavon’ terrorists, was the spark that ignited the Gazan powder keg that Israel had created — what the CIA at the time called ‘more than 200,000 Palestinian Arab refugees, deeply embittered and frustrated after more than six years in camps,’ and whom the United Nations had failed to protect ‘against Israeli attacks.’ Gazan refugees rioted against the Egyptian regime for its inability to defend them, Nasser stopped secret peace talks he was holding with Israel, the British and Americans stopped their ‘Project Alpha’ initiative to bring a lasting peace, Fedayeen groups formed and attacked southern Israel, and these in turn provided Israel’s pretext for its next occupation of Gaza in which hundreds more civilians were killed. Pressure on Nasser to purchase weapons heightened, and unable to buy them from the US, he concluded an arms deal with Czechoslovakia. 'It is no flight of fancy,’ Britain’s Ambassador in Israel reported in 1956, ‘to suggest that Israel, by her attack on Gaza in February [28, 1955], was herself responsible for Egypt’s decision in August to accept Communist arms.’ The US feared Soviet influence in the region and was furious at Nasser (though Israel had also bought arms through Czechoslovakia in 1948). His hopes for a US loan to build a high dam at Aswan now looked all but dead, contributing to his decision to nationalize the Suez Canal. When on 26 July 1956 Nasser announced this move, he sealed his fate. His relationship with the West was poisoned, and ‘regime change’ was the solution: Prime Minister Eden looked to military action to oust him.
Thus Britain, instead of attacking Israel to defend Jordan or Egypt, joined with Israel and France against Egypt in Operation Musketeer, creating the war known as the Suez Crisis. Yet Britain’s seemingly antithetical options — destroying Israel’s military, versus joining forces with it against Egypt — were kept alive simultaneously. These remarkable instructions were written by the Chiefs of Staff Committee:
‘If these operations [British neutralizing of Israeli Air Force and communications] are ordered while Musketeer [British-Israeli-French attack against Egypt] is still held in readiness they [attacks against Israel] will take priority and consequent delay to Musketeer will be accepted.’
Britain’s assault against Israel would delay, but not necessarily stop, its collaboration with Israel against Egypt afterwards. After Musketeer, which was to be launched on 15 September, was postponed ‘due to political factors,’ top British military figures continued to discuss logistics and circulate plans for a British attack on Israel. If the attack against Israel was commenced, squadrons in Malta, Germany, and Cyprus that were in place for Musketeer would be used, but without compromising their readiness for Musketeer should it be enacted afterwards.
Nor the opposite: the launching of the ‘Musketeer’ attack against Egypt would not mean that Britain would not attack Israel afterwards. The seemingly irreconcilable contradiction is caught in this instruction from the Ministry of Defence on 18 October, a scant eleven days before Israel invaded Egypt in step one of Musketeer:
‘We are advising Ministers that, once Musketeer is launched, we should avoid all hostilities with Israel until after Egypt had capitulated or we could dispose our maximum air effort against Israel.’
Among the many twists that the British had to weigh were that if during Musketeer Jordan were to support Egypt, Britain might, ironically, be bound to attack Jordan; and since Cyprus remained an important base for both Musketeer and an attack against Israel, a British attack on Israel would risk an Israeli attack and French losses on that island.
In the build-up to Suez, Israeli attacks against the West Bank continued. About twenty Palestinians were killed in a raid on Hebron on 11 September, and about ninety lay dead after an assault against Qalqilya on the night of 10 October. But a renewed Jordanian request for British protection following the Qalqilya attack was moot: on 29 October, Israel invaded Egypt. Musketeer had begun.
This first move in the new conspiracy to destabilize Egypt was accompanied by one of the better documented Israeli massacres against non-Jews within Israel (rather than cross-Armistice into Palestine). Israel had maintained a 6:00 PM curfew on the village of Kafr Qasim (since non-Jews were under martial law), but at 4:45 that afternoon the villagers were informed that the curfew was now 5:00, effective immediately. Many of the villagers were out in the fields and could not possibly be informed of the change and be back in fifteen minutes. Over the next hour, twenty-two children aged eight to seventeen, six women (one of whom was pregnant), and nineteen men were shot dead by Israeli soldiers as they returned home from the day’s labor.
After the Suez Crisis, Israeli forces remained in Gaza and began the large-scale execution of civilians and soldiers. According to the UN’s figures, within the first three weeks of its occupation of Gaza the Israeli military killed 447-550 civilians ‘in cold blood and for no apparent reason,’ in the words of the head of the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission (EIMAC). Between 49 and 100 more refugees were killed when Israel seized Rafah in the first two days of November, and a few hundred people, about half of whom were refugees from 1948, were executed by Israeli troops upon capturing Khan Yunis on 3 November. When Israel cited Palestinian ‘fedayeen activity’ to justify its occupation and assault on Gaza, the US Eisenhower Administration ‘derided’ Israel’s explanation; in response, the Jerusalem Post, which the CIA considered to reflect the voice of the government, accused the United States of being ‘singularly unfriendly,’ a ‘crystallization of [US] policy against Israel.’ Israel used the attack against Egypt to seize the Sinai, which it intended to annex. For Eisenhower, the celebrated general of World War II, Israel had finally gone too far. He threatened to stop US underwriting of Israel if it refused to vacate the Sinai, and unlike all such US threats before and after, this one time this one president did not back down. Privately, Administration figures like Secretary of State Dulles were warning that Israel was effectively running US foreign policy; and the pressure on Eisenhower to yield to Israel was so great that on 20 February, 1957, he appeared on national television to explain what in any other situation would not need explanation: why a nation should not be permitted to seize and annex land by force of arms, or to impose conditions on its own withdrawal. Ben-Gurion stood fast, telling the world that Eisenhower’s demands ‘place me under great moral pressure... as a man and a Jew, the pressure of the justice for which my people were fighting.’ Israel, Ben-Gurion suggested, was the victim of discrimination ‘because we are few, weak and perhaps isolated.’ Ultimately, with face-saving diplomacy, Israel withdrew.
With the conclusion of Suez, its first post-statehood war, Israel had fully established its techniques of expansion and racial cleansing that continue to serve it today: its maintenance of an existential threat, both as the natural consequence of its aggression and of provocation for the purpose; its expropriation and squandering of the moral weight of historic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; its dehumanization of the Palestinians; its pretense as the prophet-state of Jews; and its seduction of its Jewish population with the perks of blood privilege. The myths that had once roused terrorists to action were now the narrative of the state, and this narrative-myth remains Israel’s most powerful weapon. Were this book to continue into the ensuing decades, the circumstances and personalities would change, but the psyche and inertia of a settler movement determined to ‘regain’ a ‘racially pure’ land to which it claims messianic entitlement, would be ever-constant.
Hoewel het merendeel van de grondleggers van de ‘Joodse staat’ zichzelf presenteerden als linkse atheïsten, gedroegen zij zich, gelijk de huidige ultra-rechtse regimes in Israel, als representanten van het door een opperwezen ‘uitverkoren volk,’ dat zich — net als de nazi's zich ‘een soort Übermenschen’ voelden, die vanzelfsprekend het recht hebben op ‘Lebensraum,’ oftewel het grondgebied van anderen. Dit is nog steeds het leidmotief van het zionistisch fascisme. Het is geenszins overdreven te stellen dat de Joden in Israel, evenals de joden buiten deze heilstaat — die het Joods-Israelisch terrorisme direct of indirect steunen — aan een ernstige psychologische stoornis lijden. Het Joods-Israelisch regime is als twee druppels water gaan lijken op zijn vroegere vervolgers en hun beulen. In een ‘postscriptum’ beschrijft Suárez het als volgt:
After the Suez Crisis, the situation in Israel-Palestine returned to normal — ’normal’ being the chokehold under which Palestine has been suffocating since early 1948. To the international community, this unrelenting crippling of Palestinian life is static, and therefore it is peace. The ever-present, untenable injustice remains, a permanent state of normalized violence festering until Israel’s next move. With the Six Day War of 1967, Israel ethnically cleansed three hundred thousand more Palestinians and occupied what remained of their land. That war brought new American capitulation as Israel launched a sustained, deadly attack on the USS Liberty by both air and sea, which the Johnson Administration called an ‘accident’ as it tried to silence the survivors. More UN Resolutions, now pale ghosts of their 1948-1949 ancestors, were passed and ignored. The stranglehold on Palestine and Palestinians tightened, and the violent ‘peace’ returned once more. Again in 1980, when Israel ‘annexed’ East Jerusalem, several explicit Security Council Resolutions demanded it cease the expulsion of non-Jews and destruction of non-Jewish archaeological sites. Even though these Resolutions explicitly warned Israel that its rush to create ‘facts on the ground’ would change nothing, they too quickly joined their predecessors in the graveyard of unrequited demands.
Since every new Israeli defiance has been answered with weakened demands, Israel has since its birth been rewarded for its non-compliance. With every newly emasculated ruling, the previous, unenforced ones are forgotten, effectively ‘giving’ Israel the difference. The ‘clock is restarted’ regarding non-compliance, until the next, ever weaker and equally unenforced rulings incrementally ‘lower the bar’ of what is, futilely, demanded of Israel. The settler state’s crowning achievement was the Trojan horse known as the Oslo Accords, which effectively gave official sanction to everything it had imposed by force. Nor are Palestinians alone made to pay for the settler state: Generations of Egyptians in particular have been condemned to the tyranny of pro-Israel regimes imposed upon them by United States money and force, a crushing obstacle to any popular, democratic ‘Arab spring.’
Israel’s strangling of Gaza — profound, unremitting violence, even when it is not dropping bombs or shooting its farmers and fishermen — and its violent subjugation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, are all sold as the unwanted burden placed upon a peace-seeking democracy saddled amidst uncivilized neighbors. We are conditioned to accept all this as we are conditioned to accept everything in Israel-Palestine: Israeli invasions are self-defense, and Palestinians resisting its invasions are terrorists. In the aftermath of 1967’s newly-widened occupation, Avraham Shalom, former head of Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), complained of a lack of purpose ‘because [Palestinian] terrorism hadn’t developed.’ Intensified Israeli provocation was the answer: then, ‘luckily for us,’ Shalom continued, ‘terrorism increased.’ When Hamas or fringe groups in Gaza retaliate against Israeli attacks, Israel alerts the world to the ‘terror attack’ and ‘defends’ itself by carnage against the very population Israel holds captive in the coastal enclave. In the wake of its ‘Cast Lead’ operation (Dec ‘08 – Jan ‘09), Israel left behind what was supposed to be its worst nightmare — a vast stockpile of unexploded ordnance (UXO) inside Gaza — yet for fourteen months, Israel steadfastly blocked UN bomb experts from neutralizing this huge stockpile of explosive devices that Israel itself put there. It actively prevented their destruction, insuring that the vast cache of explosives would be taken by Hamas and, more dangerously for Israel, fringe groups — as, of course, happened. Soon, Israeli headlines decried ‘terrorism’ when white phosphorus was fired into southern Israel. With well over ten thousand Palestinians killed by Israel since the Oslo Accords, the US media religiously confine the discourse to two options: Most pundits, and the US Congress, offer unqualified support for Israeli attacks, while dissenting commentators suggest that Israel’s actions might have been ‘disproportionate’ — justified, yes, but perhaps a bit too much ‘defense.’ The spectrum of permissible debate lies entirely in the realm of narrative; what is actually happening remains unspoken. ‘Self-defense’ is never questioned: Israel invokes it to block the rebuilding of the homes it bombs and the sewage plants it destroys, to keep out the doctors who care for its victims, to stifle access to food and potable water (95% of which in Gaza is now undrinkable), and above all to squash any form of Palestinian self-sufficiency or achievement.
Addressing the root causes of the so-called ‘conflict’ is and always has been in Israel’s hands. Palestinians have no chips to bargain away except their inalienable right to justice. No Palestinian has ever occupied or laid siege to Israel. No Palestinian has ever controlled who may, and who may not, enter Israel, blocked Israeli students from pursuing their education or blocked Israeli musicians from performing or athletes from competing. Palestinians have never commandeered Israeli aquifers, decided for Israelis whom their elected leaders may be, whether they may see a doctor or travel to their own country or visit their family. Palestinians have never stopped Israeli children from playing the violin or Israeli schools from teaching Israeli history. No Palestinian has ever forbidden Israelis from putting a desk or books in a schoolroom or eating lentils or using shampoo without conditioner — all this an infinitesimal taste of Israel’s totalitarian grip. Palestinians have no Israeli prisoners to release, and the one time they did, he was an invading soldier. Yet whereas his capture (and ultimate release) became an international cause célèbre, we are unaware of and/or untroubled by the several thousand Palestinian civilians that are in Israeli dungeons at any one time, including hundreds of children, many tortured, and many held indefinitely without charge. Nor are we troubled by the IDFs nightly raids through the occupied West Bank to pull sleeping youths from their homes for allegedly resisting Israel’s occupation of their villages. Through the kaleidoscope of the narrative that informs our morality, the capture of a single invading Israeli soldier is an act of terrorism, whereas the decades of Israeli prisons brimming full of Palestinian civilians kidnapped on Palestinian soil merely confirms the violent existential threat that is Israel’s ever-present burden.
When Palestinians are asked to compromise, what is actually meant is for them to give up yet more — even this they have done, but with political Zionism’s original, unshakable goal not yet fully achieved, the ‘peace process’ is and has always been a time-buying fraud. A solution will require untangling the injustice back not to 1967, but to 1947, and reconciliation with the truth back to the events of 1914-1917. The moment the ethno-nationalist movement of Zionism set sights on Palestine as a settler state based on claims of genetic entitlement, there was no other possible outcome but the tragedy seen in today’s headlines.
Terrorism — political violence against civilians — is the only means through which an indigenous population can be subjugated, dehumanized, and displaced. This, stripped of all baggage, is the reality of today’s Israel-Palestine ‘conflict.’
Inderdaad, voor zionisten geldt: ‘Es gibt Untermenschen und Übermenschen.’ Van de geschiedenis hebben zij niets geleerd. De mens is nog steeds een barbaar.
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